Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Carl Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

“I’m a good person,” a client said. But all around her—her husband, her children, siblings, parents, neighbours, immigrants, foreigners—were bad. This construction of the world left her lonely and disengaged, holding on only to her sense of superiority. She came to therapy when it came crashing down.

“I’m the bad guy?” says Michael Douglas at the end of the movie Falling Down. Robert Duvall, the cop aiming his pistol at him on the Santa Monia Pier, nods. 
​
“How’d that happen?”
​
A few weeks ago my therapist sent me a link to an extraordinary song that explores these themes. Hi Ren went live on YouTube on December 15 last year. When I first saw it, it had surpassed 5 million views. Today it’s reached 8.2 million and it's rising super fast. Word of mouth: This is the song of our time; a human anthem.

It starts with Ren, wearing a hospital gown, being wheeled into a semi-derelict room by a man with a pig’s head and a bloodied butcher’s apron. Ren is obviously a patient. He too is perhaps feeling derelict and abandoned—and powerless too in the hands of those charged with his care.

He starts playing the guitar.

It’s beautiful. An acoustic guitar. A pleasing melody. The incongruity of the surroundings. But he’s tugging at the nylon strings a bit hard. A bit twangy. Aggressive considering the sweet Flamenco notes that fill the room.

Then Ren opens his mouth and the melody is joined by a wail of wild, high-pitched half notes. It is otherworldly. It is perhaps something like the human mating call before we learned to speak, or the dawn chorus in Hades. We are drawn to this—we willingly enter his beautiful madness.

And then the rapping starts.

In his famous Red Book Jung attempts to commune with his own soul.

“ ‘My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?' he starts. 'I speak, I call you – are you
there?’ ”

In this piece of work, Ren opens with a salutation from his shadow to his ego.

“Hi there, Ren,” he hisses. “It's been a little while, did you miss me?”

This is the opening salvo in a blistering verbal assault from Ren’s inner critical voice.

Replies Ren:
“I’ve been taking some time to be distant,” he explains.
“I've been taking some time to be still.
“I've been taking some time to be by myself since my therapist told me I'm ill.
“And I've been making some progress lately,
“And I've learnt some new coping skills”

The critical voice is extremely skeptical:
“Ren, you sound more insane than I do,” he says.

He mocks Ren for imagining that some standard course of treatment—take another pill, the sound of white noise, a 10-step program—will make any difference, and ridicules his musical ambitions.

The argument hots up until the critical voice thunders his authority. He is the snake in Eden. Lucifer. Antichrist. Mephistopheles. Satan.
“I am you, Ren, you are me.”

Who is Ren actually, this Keats-with-guitar? Where did this guy come from? You could be excused for imagining he just picked up a guitar one day in a psych ward and discovered his madness instinctively knew how to play and had something to say.

Ren Gill was actually a talented musician in his youth. He started out making beats in his bedroom at 13, then went on to Bath Spa University to study music performance. One day in 2009, busking in his hometown of Brighton, he was spotted by a talent scout and snapped up by Sony Records.

The childhood dream swiftly turned into a nightmare however. Ren woke one morning feeling utterly lethargic, drained, and aching all over. He started having panic attacks. He’d stay in bed. He said: “My life changed overnight, I woke up one morning feeling like I'd been spiked—my personality disappeared.”

He entered the mental health system. He was put on antidepressants. Antipsychotics. It's not hard to imagine the kinds of interpretations psychology offered up for his illness—he was probably told for example that he was depressed, suffering from low self-esteem, bipolar, afraid of success, delusional, paranoid, mad. In some cultures he would be considered possessed, in need of an exorcism.

​The truth, discovered many years later, was that he had a longstanding untreated case of Lyme disease, the complications of which still impact him today. Ren’s health problems were perhaps not manifestations of some inner psychic conflict. He was bitten by a tic.

He has struggled. But perhaps the struggle, the suffering, is integral to his genius.

In the final stanza, Ren refuses to back down, and stands to face his demon:
“I go by many names also,
“Some people know me as hope,
“Some people know me as the voice that you hear when you loosen the noose on the rope.”

I’ve watched Hi Ren countless times now, but this passage, this lone shriek in the cold, silent void of a long and desolate night, this absolute guttural refusal to quit, still reverberates. This is courage. And if you going to live, stand in the fire, sing at the top of your lungs! Ferocious, persistent, immortal! 

The Hollywood movies might leave it there. The good guy narrowly defeats the bad guy, the evil forces are vanquished, and the credit roll as a beautiful melody transports us back to our lives.
 
Critical self
I have worked with many clients whose lives are made wretched by an invisible sargeant major who subjects them to a permanent harangue of negativity. It can come as quite a shock to discover that some of the nicest people are often subject to a totalitarian inner form of government—a brutal, relentless inner monologue that is with them 24 hours a day.

Perhaps it is an internalised strict parent, sibling, school bully, racist, sexist, homophobe, ableist. The child who is abused by a parent may conclude that love and abuse are indivisible. Lorna Smith Benjamin describes masochism as a gift of love to the original abuser.

Perhaps you experienced a traumatic event or time in your life, one that was so terrible it couldn’t be processed so was instead dissociated, divided up into images, sensations, stray thoughts and emotions. You bury these fragments in a deep hole at the far end of the garden, but to your great dismay they keep coming back. The past reverberates in the present. Time in itself does not necessarily heal.

I’ve also met people who might have had perfectly idyllic childhoods yet still berate themselves mercilessly for every bone-headed move, bad-hair day or dumb remark. Perhaps your critical voice starts out by alerting you to where you might have room for improvement, acting in your best interests, but over the years it can become domineering and disempowering. 

Incidentally, if “the voice” is more than a thought or a feeling but is experienced as an actual, heard voice, some people might conclude that you must be mad, possessed and probably dangerous. And while such voices may point to the consideration of psychosis, it does not prove it. Many people hear voices at times for a variety of reasons.
​
Therapy might enable a client to develop a greater awareness and understanding of their inner critic. We might imagine it is an actual person—what age, gender? Remind you of anyone you know? The client might have a conversation with their critical voice. It can be useful to think of humans as being made up of multiple “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry. They all inhabit our being in a loose confederacy. And the client might find some other sentiments in this “community of selves” that can challenge and counter the inner bully.

The shadow
Sometimes, however, therapy attempts to go too far in expunging any negativity or nastiness. Jung argued we not born pure, but whole. We cannot edit ourselves to be merely good. We can never be untethered from our shadow. In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung called the shadow—“everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge” about themselves (1995: 418).

Pure goodness becomes insipid. Heaven, with no shade, is no place for humans—a place, as David Byrne sung, where “nothing ever happens.”

Anyone who denies their inner propensity for evil as well as good will find that it manifests itself in unanticipated ways.

To make light—to live—is to cast a shadow. This is a chiaroscuro world. 

Artists, poets, writers, musicians, comedians, people who bring light to the world, must also experience darkness. 

And the shadow, by the way, doesn’t always have to be something bad. You might disavow your own brilliance, or talent, or potential for success. The more a person identifies with and invests in one polarity, the greater the opposite polarity grows in the shadow. 

We don't like bad stuff. The child who has not yet learned to tolerate and accept anger will hand it off, screaming at the grown-up: “Why are so angry with me?"

Any emotions, beliefs or characteristics that don't fit with your carefully-crafted, social media-ready self-image are simply projected onto others. Your partner—that's the easiest place to start. Then there are family members—one sibling is often cast as "the bad one"—neighbours, that asshole at work, men, women, black people, white people, those people over there, others.

The targets for projection and scapegoating are plentiful. Twitter is a very shadowy place indeed.

Writes Robert A. Johnson in Owning your own shadow: “Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children...If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion."  (1991: 34).

So how do you find your shadow? Ask yourself: Who do you judge? Your enemies, the people you dislike the most, have much to teach you. For they are you.

Projecting your shadow isn't just bad for others. It's bad for you too. Continues Johnson: “To refuse the dark side in one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshipped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us. We must be whole whether we like it or not” (1991: 26).

You want world peace? To start with, stop pointing accusatory fingers every which way, and instead take a look inside.

If we can own our shadow we can develop some conscious control over it, rather than have it unconsciously express itself in disastrous ways. And if we can accept that we are all flawed, vulnerable, insignificant, ignorant, that life is hard but also beautiful, that not one person on this planet knows how or why we are here, then we can perhaps be more empathic, more forgiving, kinder. We can greet each other. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same root, the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. We are not celestial beings. We return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

”No one can escape the dark side of life,” writes Johnson. ”The balance of dark and light is ultimately possible—and bearable” (1991: 15).

Let's dance 
At the end of Hi Ren, this remarkable young man puts the guitar down, looks right into the camera and delivers a powerful soliloquy.

“It wasn't David versus Goliath,” he says, “it was a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast.
​
“It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got. The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled. And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier. It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods. And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.”

My Dad died recently.

He’d been bedbound for the better part of a year, and he was unhappy about that, and he was suffering a great deal at times. At the age of 98, he’d had enough.

We had a few brief conversations about death. He was driven by fact and reason and was not a religious man — “when you die, that’s the end of it,” he would say. But even without the prospect of being greeted by heavenly cherubs or reunited with my dear old Mum or any kind of afterlife, he so wanted to go. He would wake from a doze and shake his head in disbelief that he was still alive. In a recent Christmas card — his home-made cards, marvels of eccentric design, were legendary — he wrote simply: “Still here. I know not why.”

My Dad’s early life was a combination of great privilege coupled with extraordinary privation. He was born into a world of colonial excess. From 1903 to 1938, his father — described by a colleague as “small, active, rubicund with a choleric eye” — managed a 1,700-acre tea plantation in Assam. The household included a domestic staff of 18 people, and life revolved around golf, tennis, polo, bridge and hunting parties. Pandit Nehru came by for tea. My dad remembers climbing trees to pick lychees and sweet red bananas, sailing on the mighty Brahmaputra, and once, being driven home after dark by his parents, seeing a huge tiger up close, eyes burning bright in the headlights.

But at 6, this princeling life came to an end when he was sent to boarding school in England, as was his sister, Ann, who was just 5. For the rest of their childhood, they didn’t see their parents very much. The hardships of English boarding schools between the wars and too many school holidays and Christmases spent in the company of strangers were never mentioned, though Dad did record in his self-published memoir: “I remember Fellowes who was a bully; I broke a window throwing a shoe at him.” Later, at Wellington College, Dad writes: “I once, in a spirit of rebellion, smoked a cigarette in full view of everyone and was duly beaten with a cane by one of the prefects, called Fraser, who seemed apologetic about the whole affair.” 

A bath at Wellington was to take no more than 3 minutes, including filling and emptying. Occasionally a “double bath” would be permitted: 6 luxurious minutes!

In preparation for World War Two, the pupils were put to work digging trenches and air raid shelters. One October night in 1940, the headmaster was too slow to heed the air raid siren: he was killed by a bomb. Well into old age, the sound of a siren would still send a lurching spasm through Dad’s stomach.

Jungian analyst Joy Schavieren describes “boarding school syndrome” (2011) — the trauma of being sent away comes with the imperative to show no feelings, so these infants learn to cut off their reactions or bury them deep — a kind of emotional circumcision. They can grow into adults who remain wounded by their early broken attachments, divorced from themselves, capable only of superficial relationships. To an extent this is how all boys are raised.

“We create numb, inarticulate loners," I write in “The Humanity Test" (2022). “We idolise flinty, monosyllabic killers played by John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone.

“Men are taught to be tough; to win, not love. We don’t know how we feel. We certainly don’t know how others feel. We are raised to be expendable cogs in a loveless machine."

​Pathological humility
One day in the Prospect of Whitby pub in London’s east end, Dad’s and Mum’s eyes met for the first time across a crowded room; their hearts soon followed. In her he found someone who shared his experience of a childhood starved by parental absence. In 1940, my Mum, aged 10, was evacuated from rural Suffolk to America — Suffolk was the kind of place kids from London were evacuated to — and for the remaining five years of World War Two saw her mother not at all and her father only for one weekend in 1942, when his troop ship docked in New York.

​These early experiences forged in both my parents a curious mixture of confidence and resilience — a kind of superiority even — yet coupled with an almost pathological humility.

They loved babies and dogs and they loved each other; outside of the family, however, any other actual adult humans on the whole were likely to be problematic, and best avoided. Dad believed in thrift, logic, hard work, self-reliance, independence. He was unfailingly polite and considerate. On holiday, whatever the time of day, we children learned to shuffle silently down hotel corridors — still do — because, Dad said, “people might be sleeping.” Once in his late 80s, he tripped over backwards in his yard and gashed the back of his head on a concrete ornament. Later, we asked him how long it took for an ambulance to arrive. “Oh I didn’t bother with that,” he said. “I’m sure there’s someone who would have needed it more.”

There was a time when sons would work alongside their fathers, in the fields, on the farm or in the family business, within a wider community with village elders, mentors, apprenticeship and ritual to help usher young men into adulthood. But the industrial revolution and the wheels of capitalism have spirited our fathers away from us; the village is long gone. The father is absent, or an exhausted ghost-like presence who will not speak and then disappears once more, like Hamlet’s murdered father. 

I don't ever recall discussing a personal problem with my Dad, or getting advice. I never saw him cry. It's obvious he loved his children, but saying it out loud was unthinkable. A hug? No thank you. For much of my life, I never really understood what Dad did for a living. A lot of what I now know about him today comes from a presentation and slide show about his life that he gave to his fellow care home residents, five years ago, when he was 92.

Intergenerational trauma
There may not be many words in the space between fathers and sons, but it is far from empty. Much is communicated; family culture is handed down. Words are the least of it.

There’s a lot of research and theory on the effects of intergenerational trauma and what unparented parents bring to their own children (eg. Julia Samuel, 2022). The day before Dad died, I watched excellent presentations online from Dr Oonagh Walsh and Dr Michael O’Loughlin on the long shadow cast by the Irish potato famine and its effect still today on loss, grief and healing in the Irish diaspora. We inherit a lot of the pain of our ancestors. My Dad had a mother who lost two brothers and a fiancé to World War One, and a third brother to the Russian Civil War in 1921. She carried them with her into old age — she died in 1963, 8 days after I was born. 

None of these stories, or my parents’ childhood separations, were discussed at home or for a long time even known to my siblings and I. It's hard to talk with a stiff upper lip. My Dad was mystified by the idea of therapy. I tried to explain it to him — and why I, his youngest child, followed a meandering career path that wound up with me choosing to become a therapist. “Hmmm," he said one time, “Most peculiar.”

Finding the father within
According to another Jungian, James Hollis, each man “carries a deep longing for his father and for his tribal fathers.” He concludes that healing only comes when men “activate within what they did not receive from without.” We each must be a father to ourselves. Jung said he learned more from his father in death than he ever did in life. Whoever our real father was — or wasn't — the world offers up to all kinds of other father figures, in all kinds of guises. 

I was lucky to have Dad for so long. And if it’s true that we inherit our ancestors’ pain, we must surely inherit their joy, too. Perhaps by way of compensation for all the suffering, or perhaps because the two things go hand in hand, Dad also had a great sense of fun, enjoyment and absurdity. He was really a bon viveur — he loved, food, wine, cars. He loved stuff — Dad was the first person I knew to own a pocket calculator, a videocamera, an email address. He loved to travel, roaming all over Europe by car with friends as a young man — including completing the 1954 Monte Carlo Rally in a Ford Zephyr — and all over the world by plane as a family and in his work as an engineer. On a flight to Tunisia in 1969, the pilot announced that humans had landed on the moon. We looked out of the window of the plane and there it was: A dazzling beautiful full pearl-white moon. A couple of years in the Navy on the Adriatic had given Dad a great, lifelong love of Italy (which I share). His enthusiasm, commitment and belief in his ability to speak Italian never once dimmed for a moment despite his glaring inability to speak Italian. Another thing we both loved but were bad at was golf, and I consider myself so fortunate to have spent so much of my youth with Dad, roaming the finest fairways at home and away, engaging in titanic Oedipal battles, then laughing at ourselves over drinks in the bar afterwards. We disagreed on practically everything — politics, colonialism, Brexit, climate change — but it never seemed to matter. We never really debated these things or allowed them to intrude on our relationship.

I last saw Dad a few days before he died, in his care home in Canterbury. He had a clean shirt on, there were hits from his youth playing on Alexa, and he seemed reasonably content. He wasn’t fully conscious and it wasn’t clear if he knew I was there. When “Walk like a man” came on, I asked him if he remembered it. He started singing — albeit a different song. 

I asked him if he could imagine sitting beside a pool with a glass of chianti on a warm day in the Italian lakes and — almost imperceptibly or perhaps not at all — he nodded and smiled. 

I thanked him for everything he has given us and told him how glad and lucky and grateful I feel that he is my father. 

I don’t know if he heard any of it. But it was nothing he didn't already know.

I wrote in our group family email: “It really feels like he is ready.”

People often call a death like this “a blessing.”

When we were little, Dad used to take us on epic road trips — to see family in Scotland, or sometimes to France and beyond. He'd always want to set off freakishly early; 4am was his preferred starting time. And so it was that at 4am one chilly Friday morning in January, Dad departed this life, alone and without fanfare or fuss, finally freed from his tired, worn-out body. I imagine he was thinking: “About bloody time!” If there were cherubs, the first thing they would have heard from Dad was a strongly-worded complaint.

A blessing.

Still, the news hit hard.

A punch in the face.

Even after all these years, it’s just so shocking how people that you love leave this earth.

Love you Dad.

X
 
References
Barton, J. (2022). The humanity test: Disability, therapy, society. PCCS
Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s shadow: The wounding and healing of men. Inner City Books
Samuel, J. (2022). Every family has a story: How we inherit love and loss. Penguin Life
Schaverien, J. (2011). Boarding school syndrome: Broken attachments a hidden trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27(2), 138-155.k here to edit.

In 1949, in thick fog, Ben Hogan had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. On Tuesday morning last week, in broad daylight, Tiger Woods collided with himself.  

At the time of his crash, Hogan was 36, and a late starter in a career interrupted by World War Two. Despite or perhaps because of his horrific injuries, his best triumphs lay ahead: In 1953, on shattered legs, he played just 6 tournaments and won 5 of them including the Masters, the US Open and the British Open. 

We don’t know why Tiger Woods spun off the road—no other vehicles were involved. We do know he was late and tired, and driving on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. We know he is 45, and was a very early starter in a career interrupted by wild women, sex addiction, scandal, divorce, drugs and severe physical damage brought on by too much wear and too much tear: He’s had 5 operations on his back and 5 on his knee, among many other medical decisions and revisions and incisions.

Ben Hogan had a car crash and then the man became a legend.  
Tiger Woods was a legend and then the man became a car crash. 
 
​Hallowed be thy name
Aside from golfing prowess, and a car crash, these two men have this thing in common; Both were shaped by the extremes of the father.

"The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” wrote Carl Jung. 

For Hogan this was literally true: He was 9 and in the house, possibly even in the room, when his father took his own life with a pistol. 

​Earl Woods meanwhile was a college baseball player who spent 20 years in the US Army—including tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel—before finding his true calling: putting his son on the world stage. 

He put a golf club in his hand at the age of one, had him appear on TV—with Bob Hope—at two and turned him into a kind of child soldier of golf. 

As a newly-minted pro, at a dinner in his honour, the father said of the son: “He will bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before…I acknowledge only a small part in that in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man.”

Later, he said: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”

Sports Illustrated asked for clarification, suggesting he meant sports history. He surely wasn’t suggesting Tiger would be bigger than, say, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha? Was he?

Yes, he was. He added that Tiger would accomplish miracles and was, in fact, the “Chosen One.”

Mental mastery
We are always hearing about athletes’ physical health in great detail. When the England football team captain David Beckham broke the tiny second metatarsal bone in his left foot in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, it was practically a national emergency.

But very little is said about their mental health, which is odd when you consider how odd their lives are. Studies show that around 35 percent of elite professional athletes suffer from a mental health crisis, in all the usual time-honoured ways: addiction, drugs, stress, eating disorders, sleep disorders, burnout, depression, anxiety. 

These concerns are increasingly being taken seriously by sports’ governing bodies, with a blueprint provided by the International Olympic Committee’s 2018 Expert Consensus Statement on mental health in elite athletes.

But the athletes themselves rarely speak out about their troubles. One exception is Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who suffered a Tigeresque career meltdown but lived to tell his story. Two years ago he tweeted: “I struggled with anxiety and depression and questioned whether or not I wanted to be alive anymore. It was when I hit this low that I decided to reach out and ask for the help of a licensed therapist. This decision ultimately helped save my life. You don’t have to wait for things.”

In pro sports, golf is perhaps uniquely challenging. Careers tend to be long, travel is brutal—Gary Player has spent years of his life in aeroplanes. You are on the pitch for hours, day after day, and your failures, injuries and other setbacks are many and often painfully public. It can be a solitary existence; research shows a higher risk of mental ill-health in individual sports than in team sports.

Then there is the culture of golf. You play the ball as it lies. You don’t complain. You accept the bad bounces. And above all, you must maintain the image of golf as good and wholesome, a cure for mental ill-health rather than a cause of it. While other top athletes spit and swear and occasionally break someone’s jaw, golf pros are expected to call penalties on themselves, shake hands with their opponents, donate their winnings to the nearest cancer hospital. It’s good for business.

Any famous golfer must surely struggle at times with their idealized public image as a dominant, fearless but ever-polite superhero, a role model, an exemplar of human potential, especially when beset by feelings of internal turmoil or doubt or murderous rage or the vast emptiness that fame and a life on the road can bestow. The more vaunted the image, the bigger the shadow.

When you consider what Tiger Woods has been through—his childhood, the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, the scandals, injuries, accidents, and not least, throughout it all, the endless death threats, trollings, put-downs and shamings from a largely white sport with a racist history—his comeback in 2018 and 2019 is astonishing.

But as he recovers from his horrific injuries—he surely will—perhaps what comes next is not another comeback to the Tiger of old, but a “go forward” to something new.

The real Tiger Woods is neither the world peace humanitarian he was once made out to be; nor is he a sex-addicted junkie. Like anyone, he’s just trying to play it down the middle.

Jung wrote a pretty good guidebook for this sort of thing, called “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” He writes: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
​

As I set up my voice recorder on Donald Trump’s desk, my hand was shaking. “Sorry about my hand,” I told him. “I have Parkinson’s.”
“Oh that’s great,” said the future U.S. president. “That gets better as you get older, right? Some of my friends have it—they do great with it.”
Of all the many varied and sometimes baffling reactions from people to news of my neurological ill-health, Trump’s was the most remarkable. Parkinson’s is degenerative? Fake news.
It was July 2014 and I was in Trump’s gilded office, high above New York’s Fifth Avenue, to interview him for the American magazine Golf Digest. I spent 90 relentless minutes in Trump’s PR wind tunnel, blasted by bluster, amplification and foghorn declarations of greatness.
It starts with extreme, absurd flattery: He introduced me to some men in suits as “the finest journalist ever to come out of the U.K.” It swiftly moves on to Trump: “There is nobody more aesthetic than me”; “There’s nobody more environmental than me”; “I have the greatest brand in the world.”
These audacious, breathtaking assertions perhaps explain Trump’s success: “Trump” is a fantasy world where anything is possible, dreams do come true, you will be rich, end everyone loves you—apart from a few “losers and haters.” 
But it also perhaps contains the seeds of what will surely be Trump’s eventual downfall. Norman Vincent Peale was a friend of Trump’s parents, a pastor and the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” He had a huge influence on Trump from an early age.
Positivity is great—to a point. ​Over time, however, the positive thoughts can become tyrannical. They turn into exaggerations, spin, irrational optimism, delusions and lies. You start to believe in your own bullshit. You malign and punish anyone who disagrees with you—anyone who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes. You become divorced from reality (for catastrophic examples, see subprime mortgage crisis, Bernie Madoff, Brexit, much of U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s bizarre magical-thinking response to the coronavirus). Your lies drown you.

Who lies?
The truth about lying is that it is and always has been a quintessential element of being human. Kids learn to lie as soon as they learn to talk. As adults, research shows that we lie on average once or twice a day, and while most lies are modest edits to make life’s narrative flow a little better, we do occasionally tell some whoppers too, most commonly to the person that we're closest to. Eighty-five percent of job applicants lie on their resumé.
All governments  lie.
Lying is greatly reduced by guilt and the belief that honesty is a good thing, but lies can beget lies can beget bigger lies: With compulsive liars, the brain gets used to dishonesty. We expect people to be generally trustworthy and honest; we are therefore gullible. These realities are magnified enormously by social media (see The Great Hack for a chilling insight into how elections are manipulated). Beliefs in lies that accord with our worldview—including fantastical conspiracy thories—are retained even when  proven false; sometimes those beliefs even harden on being disproved.
In July, it was reported that Trump had told more than 20,000 lies since he took office, and has averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. He does not so much lie, perhaps, as regard the quaint notion of truth as an irrelevance.
But it isn’t.
It’s not true: Parkinson’s doesn’t get better as you get older. No, Mr. President, your inauguration crowd wasn’t bigger than Obama’s (and Obama by the way was born in the United States). No, you can’t buy Greenland, or get Mexico to pay for your wall, or ask Ukraine to help your election campaign. No, global warming is not a Chinese hoax, wind farms don’t cause cancer and no, you definitely can’t treat coronavirus with bleach.
I asked Trump about his controversial golf course in Aberdeen—“one of the greatest courses ever built in the world”—and his strong-arm tactics in buying the land and overturning environmental opposition.
Trump replied: “Yeah, look, what people don’t know is that a poll came out, which said I had a 93 percent approval rating in the area. There have been stories about how incredible this has been for Aberdeen. It’s been a huge, huge success for Aberdeen. Everyone’s doing well, because of my golf course. It’s so successful, and the people love me over there. Aberdeen is booming because of me. You can’t get a hotel room because of me. The course is full, by the way, it’s doing record business. I can’t get friends of mine on the course. Look, 93 percent of the people in Aberdeen love me.”
The 2010 BBC documentary All-American Billionaire shows several clips of Trump trumpeting this 93 percent approval rating in a series of interviews. Despite repeated requests, the program’s producers never could find the source of the figure; nor could a spokesman for the Trump organization; nor could I. 
And I called the course the next day, claiming to be a golfer from Edinburgh enquiring about booking a round on the course later in the year. “Come tomorrow if you want,” I was told. “Or come at the weekend. We’ve got plenty of times available.”
A favourite tactic of trumpology is to cite unnamed sources who affirm his brilliance. He referred to some “very important and very powerful political people” in Scotland who told him that Trump is the best thing to happen to Scotland in years.
At one point, growing weary of the unrelenting sales pitch, I decided to employ a bit of trumpery on Trump by citing unnamed sources who disagree with him. I told him that I had asked a few people in the golf industry what they thought the Trump brand stood for, and that one had said: “Ostentatious wealth coupled with poor taste.”
Well, he didn’t like that. The hot air turned cold. He demanded who had said such a thing. Trump said “if you put that in, it’s no longer a good story, it’s not even a fair story.” He added that the unnamed person was “gutless” for not going on the record. 

"You can do anything"
​Trump said he thought golf should be an elitist, aspirational pursuit, a reward for being rich, despite its origins in Scotland as a game of the people. He took a business call (“Absolutely…have them do something incredible there”). He repeatedly chided me for my earlier impertinence, which he described as “do-you-beat-your-wife” journalism. There was a brief visit from his eldest son and family, Don Jr., the one who likes conspiracy theories and killing rare animals.
Then it was time to go. We walked out to the reception area and posed for photos in front of a wall covered in framed magazine covers of Trump. Trump showed me the glossy 2014 Miss USA brochure—he bought the rights to it and Miss Universe in 2002—leafing through the pages, pointing out some contestants that caught his eye. 
In his book Think Big he writes: “The women I have dated over the years could have any man they want; they are the top models and most beautiful women in the world. I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have. I don’t know what it is but women have always liked it.”
Trump then proceeded to rub the side of his head against the chest of one of his secretaries, half-closing his eyes and making cooing sounds as he did so.
Many women have come forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault; in the famous “locker room banter” tape, he brags about his misconduct.
“You can do anything,” he says.
​He can say anything too, whitewashing his at-times open racism with statements such as "no one has done more for black people than me."
Many have questioned Trump’s sanity.
More than 70,000 mental health professionals signed a petition declaring “Trump is mentally ill and must be removed from office.”
The main Trump diagnosis from afar has been narcissism or, specifically, Narcissistic Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”
Others have diagnosed Trump as a psychopath or having Antisocial Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” One Oxford professor used a psychometric scale to conclude that Trump is more of a psychopath than Hitler.
Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist and also Trump’s estranged niece, is scathing in her assessment of her uncle, who she called on to resign. In her book, Too Much and Never Enough, published last month, she writes about the “malignantly dysfunctional” Trump family, especially Donald’s parents who were by turn self-serving, absent or cruel.
Trump’s own self-diagnosis is that he is a “very stable genius.”
The best diagnosis, perhaps, is that he has a full-blown, chronic case of being Donald Trump.
Trump is a kind of parody of tycoonery, distillation of capitalism, an extrapolation of what you get when society genuflects at its altar; when the law of the jungle trumps human qualities like kindness, empathy, compassion, trust, integrity, vulnerability, fairness, sharing—and love.
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruthless pig Napoleon engineers a coup against his fellow revolutionary leader, Snowball. He invents the lie that Snowball—the hero of the Battle of the Cowshed—is in fact a traitor, and that he, Napoleon, is the real hero (Napoleon was nowhere to be seen during the battle). The propaganda, masterminded by the pig Squealer, is successful: Snowball is driven off the land by Napoleon’s dogs, and all the bleating sheep, now living in squalor, see Napoleon as their true leader. Orwell intended the book to be a warning: Beware the megalomaniac who lies, cheats and manipulates his way to the top, spreading fear and manipulation along the way, while lining his pockets, furthering his power, and in his wake leaving any concept of society in tatters, with the populace divided, bitter, afraid and impoverished.
Trump is not the first megalomaniac, narcissist or psychopath to occupy the White House. But he might perhaps be the first president to regard himself as bigger than the presidency.
If he loses this election—“you’re fired”—he will not go gently into a retirement of golf, opening libraries and doing good charitable works; perhaps an annual Christmas selfie with Melania offering goodwill to the world. There may be outrageous legal challenges, injunctions and counteractions. Increasingly paranoid, incoherent tweets. In the Hollywood version, Trump is led away in cuffs, unshaven, his once resplendent mane now a sudden shock of white.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

“I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy, and hungry, and I'm not throwing away my shot”
--a rapping Alexander Hamilton in the musical, “Hamilton”
 
In a fractious, divisive America, on the eve of a presidential election, there is at least one thing the Democratic and Republican Parties can actually agree on: the United States should be governed by a really old, white man.

Donald Trump, 74, was the oldest ever president to take office when he won the election four years ago. (Ronald Reagan was the oldest ever president: he was two weeks shy of his 78th birthday on leaving the White House, after two terms in office, in 1989.)

The Democrats had an opportunity to nominate someone “young, scrappy and hungry,” a new JFK to inspire a nation, build bridges instead of walls, and give Trump a simple message: “You’re fired.” Instead they picked someone even older. Joe Biden turns 78 next month. 

​The unseemly first presidential debate between Trump and Biden was like watching footage of a thrashing, groaning fight to the death of the last two dinosaurs on earth. Why must the president be a geriatric patriarch—in a youthful, optimistic, idealistic land of exuberant energy, innovation, creativity, diversity, opportunity, a land where a rallying cry of a generation was once “never trust anyone over 30”?
 
Father hunger
“America is a mistake,” Sigmund Freud told a friend on his return from a trip there. “A giant mistake.”

It was Freud’s sole visit to America—he was invited to introduce psychoanalysis to the New World in a series of lectures in 1909. It wasn’t a happy experience. He didn’t like the food, the informality, the unfamiliar surroundings. He couldn’t sleep. Perhaps he felt ill at ease among “an alien people clutching their gods.” Freud regarded any god as an illusion, a fantasy born of an infantile need for a  father figure. America is an outlier in this regard: In one survey 60.6 percent of Americans said they are certain “God” exists. For the British the figure is 16.8. (Others results include France: 15.5; Norway: 14.8; Denmark: 13.0; Sweden: 10.2; Japan: 4.3.)

Freud would likely see the current presidential race as further evidence that America has daddy issues; specifically a chronic case of “father hunger.”

There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. One in every three American children are now growing up in a home without their biological father. According to the US Census Bureau, only 17 percent of custodial parents are fathers. Of the fathers who live apart from their children post-divorce, 27 percent have no contact with those children at all. One study reports that just 17 percent of American men had a positive relationship with their fathers.

In “Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men," Jungian analyst James Hollis writes that when a parent is absent, the child “carries the deficit throughout his life. He longs for something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and crave a certain food…all men, whether they know it or not, hunger for their father and grieve over his loss.” 

Father hunger in women causes actual hunger, according to Margo Maine’s book of the same name, giving rise to “unrealistic body image, yo-yo dieting, food fears and disordered eating patterns.”

Americans look for father figures in teachers, preachers and self-help gurus; in famous athletes, tough guy movie stars, eccentric TV detectives. They turn for reassurance to the “founding fathers,” those quasi-dieties who united the early states, freed them from British rule, and wrote the Constitution.

And they look for a father-in-chief in the White House, in men like Bill Clinton, who never met his father, or Barack Obama, who never knew his, or Joe Biden, whose father struggled at times with poverty and unemployment but was a loving, constant father to the boy. Earlier this year, Biden wished his late father a happy Father's Day, saying, “As my father believed, there’s no higher calling for a woman or a man than to be a good mother or a good father." 
​
Or in Donald Trump.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, likened the last election to a choice between mum and dad, and predicted Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. “The thing about dad is that dad is kind of an a-hole,” Adams told CNN. “But if you need dad to take care of some trouble, he's going to be the one you call. You know, if there's a noise downstairs, you probably are not going to call mom, even if she's awesome. You're probably going to call the biggest person in the room, you're going to call dad. So in our irrational minds, if the world is exploding and we're still talking about nuclear terrorism, I think people are going to say, maybe you want the most dangerous person to protect us.”
 
Psychic mutilation
“What is it with men?” a client said to me recently. Another relationship had ended in disappointment; she was being “ghosted.” Her father vanished years ago. She’s had no contact at all since childhood.

Three-quarters of American men are circumcized, subjected as babies to a barbaric mutilation that belongs in another, more primitive century. The emotional circumcision swiftly follows. Writes bel hooks: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler argued that men will often overcompensate for their fear of vulnerability with a lurch toward stereotypical male aggression and competition. What Jung called the anima, the feminine, is denied; the animus is embraced. (To be whole, said Jung, both must be integrated.) The boy-man is pure animus—animosity—shorn of anything that might be considered anima—the animating effects of emotion, creativity, compassion, collaboration. The most macho are the most afraid.

Adler called this the “masculine protest” and regarded it as an evil force in history, underlying for instance the rise in fascism in the 20th century. To be taken seriously as a leader one must appear devoutly unempathic, unfeeling, uncompromising, unflinching (this is especially true of women, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher being the obvious, almost-cartoonish example).

We tell our sons to man up or, in the absence of fathers, father figures or modern-day tribal elders, they are told nothing at all; they feel nothing, say little and become numb, inarticulate loners, expendable cogs in a loveless machine. Men make up 93 percent of American workplace fatalities and 99 percent of American combat fatalities. Men are three times more likely than women to take their own life, three times more likely to have an addiction, and they live shorter lives than women—on average a whopping five years shorter.

In many families, the father (if there is one) is like a shy, possibly mythic woodland creature: sightings are rare, and fleeting. Or they become the hapless chump of the household, the doofus dad who just doesn’t get it and can’t do DIY; the lovable loser who is part of the furniture of the great sitcom that is America. He is neutered, like the family pet. He dreams of making his own declaration of independence—of kicking over the saloon tables and riding off into the sunset, leaving women to clear up the mess. Sometimes, he actually does it.
 
Jung's father
Accompanying Freud on his trip to America was his young Swiss protegé, Carl Jung. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was something of a father figure to Jung. Jung’s real father had passed away a decade earlier, when Jung was just 21. Paul Jung was a pastor who was plagued by doubts about his faith and was something of a disappointment to his son as a spiritual guide. 

Six weeks after he died, he appeared to Jung in a dream, telling his son that he was better now and was “coming home.”

For Jung the dream was “an unforgettable experience” that forced him “for the first time to think about life after death.” From that night forward, Jung’s relationhip with his father took off. He learned more from him in death than he ever did in life. Death shall have no dominion.

Freud found such magical thinking intolerable. The two men became adversaries. Having discovered his father, Jung no longer needed a surrogate.

New world order
There’s a small but growing number of young female heads of state who manage to combine caring with capitalism, super-smart social democratically-minded pragmatists who are creating fair, functioning societies and by all accounts have done much better job of responding to the coronavirus than the US or UK. People like Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Erna Solberg (Norway), Katrín Jakobsdóttir (Iceland) or Sanna Marin (Finland).
​
Perhaps America, too, is ready for such a president of the future rather than a relic of the past, someone smart, tough, fair, ambitious and multicultural—someone like America itself—someone like Biden’s running mate, California senator Kamala Harris, or, the next generation, 30-year-old New York Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender who took on the Establishment and won (see the excellent Netflix documentary “Bringing Down the House").
 
The father within
Father hunger is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. It is perhaps the wheels of capitalism that mostly spirit fathers away from their sons and daughters. We used to work to live; ever since what Polanyi called the “great transformation,” we tend to live to work, enslaved to a rapacious, introjected Faustian machine. Fromm argued that we are now mere robots, compliant cogs in the machine, concluding: “in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.” 

A pre-coronavirus survey in January showed that three–quarters of UK workers felt stressed about work, almost two-thirds complained of feeling they are always on duty and cannot switch off, with 64 per cent reporting that their job had damaged their sleep patterns.

I see plenty of clients who never met their fathers, or never really knew them, or had fathers or stepfathers who they wished had been absent rather than violent, excessively demanding or abusive in other ways.

Many who have done everything they were supposed to do wind up in therapy in midlife because they feel like dead men walking. Success stories on paper, in person they are ghosts. They are absent from their own lives, never mind anyone else’s.

As Hollis points out, what a father cannot access in himself cannot be passed on.

Jung's “father hunger” was not satiated until he found within himself an inner father, an archetypal energy to protect, guide and offer spiritual wisdom. 

Donald Trump is not your father. Nor is Joe Biden. Nor is Boris Johnson (actually he might be: His Wikipedia entry on his children simply says “at least six”).

Your father is you.
​
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart,” wrote Jung. “Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity.

“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

• RELATED: What can we learn from Donald Trump?

Among the tens of millions of deaths resulting from the last great flu pandemic 100 years ago—the so-called Spanish flu—was Sophie Halberstadt, the fifth of Sigmund Freud’s six children. She died on January 25, 1920.

Freud wrote to his mother the next day, informing her of the terrible news, and adding: “I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.”

The next day he wrote to his friend, Oskar Pfister, that “sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of a glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed...The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday Child!”

There was no comfort in religion for Freud—famously atheistic, he regarded a belief in god as an infantile need for a father figure. Writing of Sophie’s passing to psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, Freud said: “as a confirmed unbeliever I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint.”

Sophie left behind two sons. The younger one, Heinele, was just a baby at the time. He was, wrote Freud, “physically very fragile, truly a child of the war, but especially intelligent and endearing." When he too died, three years later, of tuberculosis, Freud was undone. Another three years on, Freud wrote to fellow analyst Ludwig Binswanger: “This child has taken the place of all of my other children and grandchildren for me, and since then, since Heinele's death, I no longer take care of my other grandchildren and no longer feel any enjoyment in life either."

To British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones he wrote: “Sophie was a dear daughter, to be sure, but not a child. It was ... when little Heinele died, that I became tired of life permanently. Quite remarkably, there is a correspondence between him and your little one. He too was of superior intelligence and unspeakable spiritual grace, and he spoke repeatedly about dying soon. How do these children know?"

Freud had written about grief before as a younger, less blemished man. His landmark paper comparing mourning and melancholia (1917) said the former was a healthy, temporary depression following a loss, a process that when completed successfully allows the bereaved person to live and love again. Melancholia by contrast, more self-defeating, enduring and with no apparent conscious cause, was more problematic. Freud memorably described it as “an open wound.”

But as the losses mount, they can accumulate and sometimes be felt more keenly over time, not less, and the distinction between mourning and melancholia can become blurred by all the tears and the fog of remembrance.

In another letter to Binswanger in 1929, Freud wrote: “Although you know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It's the only way of perpetuating that love which we don't want to relinquish.”

Freud suffered in his life. A perpetual cigar smoker, he had more than 30 surgeries on a mouth cancer that caused him excruciating pain. He and his youngest daughter, Anna—a famous psychologist in her own right—fled the Nazis n 1938 and moved to London. Freud died by doctor-assisted suicide the following year, three weeks after the start of the Second World War—a war that saw his four sisters murdered in the Holocaust.

The death of Sophie, however, and of little Heinele were defining moments in the landscape of his 83 years on earth.
​
Freud learned that we never really get over life’s biggest losses. What we can do is honour the dead by living—and living well.
 

At night, the silence from the deserted streets and boarded-up bars in my neighbourhood in London feels ominous and dangerous. Out there in the darkness, unseen, the Corona virus continues its hideous invasion. It is efficient and unwavering in executing its sole purpose: to infect, to replicate, to spread, to grow.

With astonishing speed, it has taken over our hospitals, our conversations, our news feeds. It has closed our schools and factories, bankrupted businesses, ruined lives. It has made a mockery of our sophisticated systems, our plans, our hopes and dreams. It dominates, controls and threatens our very existence. It is coming for you and coming for me. It lives on death.

Never before has something so large—human civilization—been felled by something so small. Corona is a mini-vampire, sub-microscopic, a life form a hundred times tinier than even bacteria.

The only thing more viral than the virus itself is the fear that it evokes. Fear can divide and diminish us. But when we fight and conquer it together, fear can enlarge us.  The age of Corona: the best of times, the worst of times.

In this way, the human reaction to Corona has similarly been one of extremes: either very small or very large. On the one hand, never before have people been so selfish and stupid, ignoring infection-limiting guidelines, panic-buying loo rolls, even abusing and attacking people suspected of being Chinese. Yet the crisis is also bringing out the best in people. Our doctors and nurses face the daily apocalypse with selfless care, kindness and good cheer. People around the world are volunteering, donating, checking up on the vulnerable, doing what they can.

We are completely alone, quarantined, forced into self-isolation and social distance, yet at the same time perhaps never before have we felt so connected, and in need of each other. Family and community matter more than ever. And increasingly, our family is humans and our community is planet Earth.

We truly are all in this together. However bad we feel today, however afraid, anxious, depressed or bereaved, we are actually not alone.  Instead of “othering” we might focus on “togethering.”  Instead of hating, we can choose to love.  We can reach out and reach in. We can give and receive.

Wouldn’t we expect grown-up leaders to do the same? To share knowledge, ideas, information, best practices, resources? To build bridges, not walls? To unite to fight Corona, not each other?

At such times, nationality recedes. Corona isn’t interested in your country’s borders, its reputation, history or your culture. It doesn’t carry a passport nor respect your own.

Global problems need global solutions.
​
Yet some see this pandemic human tragedy not as an opportunity for solidarity but its opposite. At a time like this, it’s pitiful for governments to blame each other, for the far-right as usual to blame everything on migrants, or for Trump to blame China, Obama, Millennials, the media, and anyone else he can think of. It’s hard to imagine what kind of person responds to the current devastating death toll in Italy with celebratory, deranged Brexiteering.

While politicians prevaricate, bluster and blunder, the virus goes on killing.

History apparently teaches us nothing. The so-called Spanish flu—which probably originated in Kansas—infected a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, and killed tens of millions of people—more fatalities than the entire First World War.

Humans and chimpanzees are 96 percent the same, according to DNA studies. How similar then are humans to each other? What is perhaps so striking about our species is not what divides us but what unites us. We are a family. We should act like one. We should respect each other and our planet. We should tackle common problems together. We should care about family members who aren’t doing so well. We might then feel compassion and concern that 70 million of our brothers and sisters are forcibly displaced people, including 26 million refugees, half of them children. We might not feel great about a world where 42 individuals have the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, 3.7 billion souls.

​In the words of Al Pacino, “Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.”

Sometimes, it takes a sickness for healing to happen. ​